"I'll Sail My Ship Alone"

Some songs stick with you ...

A little while back I wrote a guest post for a site called What’s Curation?, an excellent music recommendation site run by Nikhil Rajagopalan. I’ve modified that essay to share with you today (but if you already read it on Nikhil’s site, take a week off and go listen to some music you first heard as a kid.)

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Songs take us interesting places, don’t they? The song I’m writing about today—Hank Wilson’s rendition of “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone”—takes me back to my childhood home in Rochester, Michigan, and to visits with my parents’ friends, Larry and Margaret, where Larry and my Dad would swap their latest music discoveries (and drink martinis). Between them, Dad and Larry dictated my musical tastes in the days before I got access to the record player and could spin the records that my brother Pete and I pooled our money to buy. Our first was the Bay City Rollers—about which we have a running joke to this day. (Hey hey deedy wa, deedy wa, night.)

The song I’m sharing today is one I still listen to with joy, for the music itself but also because it takes me back to a time when my love for my father was easy and pure and unadulterated by the difficulties that later drove us apart. (I told some of this story here.)

My dad had a big record collection (yeah, records!) and a nice turntable and speakers, and he was constantly curating the music that played. We listened to Elton John, John Denver, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, B.B. King, Dolly Parton ... the stuff that everybody was listening to. We wore a groove in the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar, an odd choice for a confirmed atheist like my dad, and that album still accounts for a troubling amount of what I know about the Christ story.

But the obscure and twangy stuff spoke to me: Doug Kershaw, John Prine (well before he was John Prine), Merle Haggard, Charlie Pride, and the guy we’re here for today, Hank Wilson, whose album Hank Wilson’s Back, Vol. I came out in 1973 (when I was nine years old). This album went on heavy rotation in our house and nearly 50 years later I can still sing along with every song (see the playlist below for a sampler). My tastes trend pretty eclectic these days, but I’ve got to say, this album hooked me on old-school country and singer/songwriters.

Got a song that started to live in your head thanks to your parents? Share it in the comments.

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Now, if you’re thinking you’ve never heard of Hank Wilson, there’s a good reason: he’s not real!

Before we go into that though, take a listen to my favorite song from the album. It’s only 2:36, won’t take long (your choice, YouTube or Spotify):

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If you recognize the voice, well, so did a lot of people. That’s because it belongs to singer-songwriter Leon Russell, who made a name for himself as a songwriter and session player in the 1960s before hitting it “big” in 1970 when he organized and played in the band on Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour. He released his first studio album that year—the eponymous Leon Russell, which includes his best-known and most covered song, “A Song for You”—and toured with Elton John and B.B. King.

The hits kept coming. His third album, Carney (1972), served up “Tightrope” and “This Masquerade,” memorably covered a few years later by George Benson. In the early 1970s, Leon Russell was getting to be a big deal.

So what’s a guy who’s starting to hit it big in rock and roll do? He heads off to Nashville with a bunch of his buddies to record an album of bluegrass and country classics: Hank Wilson’s Back, Vol. I. Then he pretty much hides in plain sight: that’s Leon on the album cover, with his back turned, and that’s him again on the flip side, identified as Hank. You’ve got to look pretty closely to find the name Leon Russell in the production credits.

It’s a hell of an album. Even if you’ve never enjoyed country music, I think you’d enjoy hearing Russell and gang cover Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” George Jones’ “The Window Up Above,” Lester Flatts’ “Rollin’ in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” or Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene.” The album did well enough that Russell and his friends recorded three more: volumes II, III, and IV in the Hank Wilson series. None are as good as the first.

Let’s focus on this one song for a minute.

“I’ll Sail My Ship Alone” was written by Moon Mullican in 1950 and reached #1 on the Country and Western “charts” before crossing over to #17 on the Pop charts. It was covered by Jerry Lee Lewis and Patsy Cline and Hank Williams and George Jones and Slim Whitman before being taken up by Hank Wilson/Leon Russell in 1973. It’s a broken-heart song, a lament by someone who’s been rejected and now must go on without their lover:

I'll sail my ship alone
With all the dreams I own
Drifting out across
The ocean blue

But there’s an edge too, because the singer isn’t going to let their lover down easy:

I'll sail my ship alone
With all the dreams I own
And when it starts to sinking
I'll blame you

Maybe it’s that bittersweetness—the heartache but also the blame—that made it so popular. And maybe that’s why it sticks with me, reminding me of the father who shared so much good music with me, who left me with so many good memories and a deep love for sad, twangy songs … but who drifted away when his life took an unwanted turn. (This will be the subject of a future piece, also anchored in a song.)

I’ll sail my ship alone, dad, but it’s not going to sink, and I don’t blame you.

My family in the early 1970s. That’s me, lower right.

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BTW: If you’ve made it this far and you’ve enjoyed it, would you consider liking this post or sharing it with a friend? These things help others find my writing and they make me smile.